The Case Against Google

For the last two months, you've seen some version of the same story all over the Internet: Delete your search history before Google's new privacy settings take effect. A straightforward piece outlining a rudimentary technique, but also evidence that the search titan has a serious trust problem on its hands.

It's not surprising that the tracking debate had people up in arms. A Pew Internet study, conducted just before Google combined its privacy policies (and after it rolled out personalized search results in Search Plus Your World) found that three quarters of people don't want their search results tracked, and two thirds don't even want them personalized based on prior history.

The bottom line: People don't trust Google with their data. And that's new.

Google is a fundamentally different company than it has been in the past. Its culture and direction have changed radically in the past 18 months. It is trying to maneuver into position to operate in a post-pc, post-Web world, reacting to what it perceives as threats, and moving to where it thinks the puck will be.

At some point in the recent past, the Mountain View brass realized that owning the Web is not enough to survive. It makes sense—people are increasingly using non Web-based avenues to access the Internet, and Google would be remiss to not make a play for that business. The problem is that in branching out, Google has also abandoned its core principles and values.

Many of us have entered into a contract with the ur search company because its claims to be a good actor inspired our trust. Google has always claimed to put the interests of the user first. It's worth questioning whether or not that's still the case. Has Google reached a point where it must be evil?

Search is Dying

Imagine you woke up tomorrow and Google was gone. You would still be able to search the Web. You could still send email. You could still use maps, make phone calls, watch videos, network with friends, write blog posts. There would be a period of adjustment, and it would be incredibly inconvenient but you would get by. There are other options.

Some would feel it more than others; Google is a tool of the masses. Despite more than 20 years of the World Wide Web and more than 35 of personal computers, the Internet is still a very troubling place for many people. Google is the cipher they use to make sense of the chaos.

Case in point: A prolific science writer I know tells a story about how his mother calls him every time her Google is broken. What she means is that her Internet is down. But for her, Google is the Internet. And that's true for many, who use its search box as a gateway to the networked world. They get to Facebook by typing "Facebook" and hitting Search. Without Google, they'd be lost.

Google may not be a utility, but search is a very utility-like service. Search is what Google was built on, and why people go to Google in the first place. And when Google rolled out its newest iteration of search—Search Plus your World (SPYW)—people reacted to it like viewing an open grave.

It's hard to understand how Google could screw up its core product like that. But there's a remarkably simple explanation: Search is no longer Google's core product.

One Googler authorized to speak for the company on background (meaning I could use the information he gave me, but not directly quote or attribute it) told me something that I found shocking. Google isn't primarily about search anymore. Sure, search is still a core product, but it's no longer the core product. The core product, he said, is simply Google.

Ultimately, it's not about Gmail or Search or Android or Chrome or Maps or Plus. All of those are in service to one great master; pieces of the larger Google. He said that if I paid attention to what Larry Page has been saying recently, this would be apparent. And yup, PandoDaily recently quoted Page saying, "This is the path we're headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful' product across everything. If you don't get that, then you should probably work somewhere else."

It's stunning when you stop and think about it. Search isn't just what Google does best, it's what it is in most people's minds. The company's name is often used as a verb meaning "to search." It's in the Oxford English Dictionary! So what happened?

The Move from Search to Answers

Google owns the Web, but it didn't build it. And as it turns out, the open Web is kind of shitty real estate. Yes, the mansion itself is huge, but it's not built to code and is in constant need of renovation to keep it from falling apart.

Meanwhile, there are all these new homes going up in the same neighborhood. Nice places. Built from the ground up to perfectly fit their owners' needs. Places that people can can get to from the Web, but aren't really made of Web. Those are the kind of joints users want to go hang out in. As Chris Anderson argued in WIRED:

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It's driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it's a world Google can't crawl, one where HTML doesn't rule.

Google needs to get inside those houses. Or failing that, build one of its own.

The Internet is the world's greatest collection of knowledge, but increasingly, that wisdom lives in walled off apps. It lives in services and platforms. Places where we build up relationships, express preferences, and reveal so much about ourselves. We're on Foursquare and Netflix and Facebook and Twitter and Skype. We're interacting in real time, and in ways that don't lend themselves well to indexing. Google can't know exactly what's going on in all those places. How the links between entities work. What and who we like and dislike. There is information there that it can't index. And if it can't index it, or understand it, it damn sure can't serve an ad.

Trouble is, that hard-to-index information is key to Google's future. Mountain View may not be all about search anymore, but it desperately wants to be able to answer real world questions for you; there's a huge difference. Search is just about retrieving information. Actually answering subjective questions requires a deep knowledge of the person doing the asking: Where you are, who your are friends, what your interests are, what you like and don't like.

Picture this scenario. You are about to leave San Francisco to drive to Lake Tahoe for a weekend of skiing, so you fire up your Android handset and ask it "what's the best restaurant between here and Lake Tahoe?"

It's an incredibly complex and subjective query. But Google wants to be able to answer it anyway. (This was an actual example given to me by Google.) To provide one, it needs to know things about you. A lot of things. A staggering number of things.

To start with, it needs to know where you are. Then there is the question of your route—are you taking 80 up to the north side of the lake, or will you take 50 and the southern route? It needs to know what you like. So it will look to the restaurants you've frequented in the past and what you've thought of them. It may want to know who is in the car with you—your vegan roommates?—and see their dining and review history as well. It would be helpful to see what kind of restaurants you've sought out before. It may look at your Web browsing habits to see what kind of sites you frequent. It wants to know which places your wider circle of friends have recommended. But of course, similar tastes may not mean similar budgets, so it could need to take a look at your spending history. It may look to the types of instructional cooking videos you've viewed or the recipes found in your browsing history.

It wants to look at every possible signal it can find, and deliver a highly relevant answer: You want to eat at Ikeda's in Auburn, California. Hey, I love that place too! Try the apple pie.

There is only one path to that answer, and it goes straight through your privacy. Google can't deliver this kind of a tailored result if you're using all kinds of other services that it doesn't control. Nor can it do it if you keep your Google services separated. You have to do all the things you used to do elsewhere within the confines of one big information sharing service called Google.